This is the second, and final part of our conversation with Tim Ash, author of Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.
In this part, we learn about global scalibility, conversion optimization for SaaS/subscription products and what it means to be a recovering technologist.
BK: Software and digital goods lend themselves to a global scale. What do companies need to be aware of regarding optimization when they’re selling in multiple countries, in multiple languages, with multiple currencies and design styles?
Tim: You have to look to see if each market is big enough, and you need to treat them completely separate. Ideally, you can do all this on a single platform, but you can’t just carbon copy what you do in one country and expect it to work in another. Even with payment methods; people don’t use credit cards in certain countries, they pay with direct debit. Or they’re uncomfortable sending payments online at all and so you have to have alternative payment methods.
There are also cultural differences in terms of color preferences and how cluttered websites can be and still be effective. There are also very specific messaging differences. George Bernard Shaw once joked about England and America as two countries dividing by a common language. There are a lot of Englishisms, Australianisms or New Zealandisms, that don’t make sense in the US and vice versa. So you have to have somebody who has cultural competence write the copy. Don’t rely on direct translation from one to the other.
BK: How would a company with a global audience proceed? What advice would you give to people who want to make sure that all of their different microsites and shopping carts are aligned with different kinds of regions?
Tim: You start by not doing every single region. This quickly becomes a game of diminishing returns. You have to be really conscious in understanding your current demographics, where people are coming from and where you are going to draw the line. While English is the world’s standard business language and you can’t avoid that, regardless of where your company is based, the second or third markets might be the only ones you consider.If you’re in Europe you might do German site and a French site and call it quits. Don’t go crazy and localize for twenty different languages. Only the biggest companies have the resources to cost justify doing that.
BK: Okay. So don’t try to do it all at first.
Tim: No. Try one country and establish the beachhead, get it right. You might start essentially with a copy of what you have in your home country and test different language messaging and calls-to-action. The testing is important because we try to make things easier on ourselves by making a lot of assumptions. We don’t even realize those assumptions are built into our cultures, but they’re there nevertheless.
BK: We work a lot with SaaS and subscription products and feel more and more software developers are moving in that direction. As companies are focusing less on that initial conversion rate and more on reducing churn rate, what should a SaaS company be doing differently than a company that relies on a one-time sale?
Tim: There are a couple things. You have to make it really easy for me to pay. The highest level of permission in Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing” book is called “i.v. permission” where you can put a tube in my bank account and suck money out at will. Sometimes you have situational permission and other lower forms of permission.
But the power of that subscription model is that once you get the right to ding my credit card so often, customers stop thinking about it. It becomes “out of sight out of mind”. They may not be thinking about the value they get every day as long as the pain threshold of how much money that’s taken is low enough, so you can extract a lot more than on a single sale.
I want to shout-out to Anne Holland (editor of WhichTestWon.com) for putting together a great site called Subscription Site Insider, which is there to help companies optimize their subscription best practices. We work with them on the conversion part of that. It’s a great way to get more money than a single sale.
The problems of course come in mostly around billing. Should you do it monthly? Annually? What happens to expiring cards? How do you reactivate people?
BK: We read an interview where you described yourself as a recovering technologist. What has had a bigger impact on your perspective of what makes a great website? Is it the experiences you’ve had or what you’ve learned formally? I think both are necessary to internet marketing success. And all my subsequent marketing experience bears that out. The internet’s very quantifiable and you want to have a very nuanced understanding of the numbers and whether something is working and moving the needle.
Tim: That is a tough one to unravel. Looking back on the larger arc of my professional life to date, I came to the University of California San Diego and got a full UC Regents Scholarship and had dual majors. One was cognitive science, studying the brain, and the other was computer engineering. I jokingly called these hardware and wetware.
At the same time, a lot of this stuff cannot be reduced to hard numbers and you need the inspiration for what to do, is going to come from creative sources, so I would say that I was perfectly prepared for my career. It just took me 25 years to realize it.
BK: Is there anything else you would like to share about the book?
Tim: I’d say that books are wonderful and this one contains lot of our distilled experiences as an agency. But if you’d really like to drink from the fire hose, come to one of our upcoming Conversion Conference events. We now have three a year (East, West and Midwest), and two in Europe: Germany and London. It’s a great way to meet your peers, learn from some of the best minds in the industry, and feel part of a community of conversion optimizers.
Tim Ash is author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners, a firm that specializes in improving website conversion rates through landing page diagnosis and redesign, conversion consulting, a/b and multivariate test plan creation, and client training/mentoring. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization.
Over the past 15 years, Tim has helped hundreds of US and international brands improve their web-based initiatives, including Canon, Google, Expedia, CBS, Sony Music, Facebook, Nestle, Verizon Wireless, Texas Instruments, Cisco, and Coach.
Tim is a highly-regarded keynote and conference presenter, and the chairperson of Conversion Conference – a worldwide conference series focused on improving online conversions. He has published hundreds of articles about website usability, best practices in landing page design and tactics to improve website conversion rates, and he is the host of the Landing Page Optimization podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.
If you missed it, you can read the first part here.
